COVID-19 is having a major impact around the world, however we are still learning about the mechanisms and manifestations of this illness. There is considerable evidence of neurological symptoms that occur in COVID-19 patients. However the impact of this, and its relationship with age, on brain structure have not been studies at all thus far. We propose to use multivariate approaches to extract covarying brain patterns from individuals to study changes associated with COVID-19 as well as potential interactions with age in older individuals. We will leverage the approaches being developed as part of the parent award, but customize them to incorporate spatial priors to address ischemic lesions. We will evaluate COVID-19 and age effects on these networks and compare them with networks extracted from normative data. We will share the methods via user friendly tools. Results are expected to provide insights into the neurological manifestations of COVID-19 including age specific effects.
In this supplement we will study covarying brain networks associated with COVID-19 in individuals with a mean age of 70.4 years. Both linear and nonlinear (deep) flexible multivariate models will be extended and applied to study CT and MRI data in 200 data sets as well as a large existing repository of elderly individuals.
